Monday, 11 January 2016

Best pal Jon and I spend two hours a day clearing Jon’s parents’ garden, for £1.50 an hour. After two hours, we down tools, ask for our wages, and then head into town, each of us to buy a David Bowie album. Each one costs £2.99, a special promotion RCA are doing in the light of the commercial success of ‘Let’s Dance’. Then it’s back to his house to listen to the albums.

Work. Wage. Album. Listen. Repeat.

It becomes the Summer of Bowie.

Salzburg Station, Summer 1989.

Inter-railing with Jon, and we find ourselves with time to kill in Salzburg station. We decide to play 20 Questions. At some stage, one of us inevitably chooses David Bowie. The identity revealed, the next person chooses a mystery animal/vegetable/mineral to be guessed. After a few questions, it is obvious that the mystery is David Bowie. The last few questions go thus:

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Who are you? David Bowie.

Oh, how we laugh.

The next person’s go, and it is obvious what is going to happen.

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Are you David Bowie? No

Who are you? David Bowie.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

It just gets funnier and funnier until we can’t breath.

11th January 2016

Jon emigrated to Australia a few years ago, so although we communicate a lot via the internet, we very rarely see each other. I got a message from him last week saying he was on a flying visit to Blighty. Seems somehow appropriate that we arranged to meet up today – 5.30, Charing Cross, and my return train is at 9.03, but some people you make the effort for (well, one person...).

Sunday, 10 January 2016

My adoptive great-great-grandfather, being quintessentially
Victorian, was both a God-bothering do-gooder who founded the NSPCC (one too
many ‘C’s in there, I fear) and the wearer of a prodigious beard. Like Lear’s
Old Man’s beard, it could easily have accommodated two owls and a hen, as well
as four larks and a wren (and maybe a few mice). One hundred or so years of
social progress has led all but a few of us to announce, with tedious
regularity, that God is dead; the belligerent among us have taken a few more
steps down this path and have relegated all religions to the ignoble status of
Death Cults. Over-generous beards, however, are still with us.

With the vexatious notion of God no longer troubling our thoughts,
we can now spend the appropriate amount of time on the truly serious business
of existence: admiring how absolutely divine we all look. Thank God for that.

Only the other day, in an attempt to keep the spirit of
spousal affability alive, I had the grave misfortune of watching
possibly the most repulsive TV programme I have ever seen. The presenter of
this show, a flame-haired obsessive compulsive shopper/lunatic, who desperately needed
to avail herself of some of that old Buddhist wisdom regarding the acquisition of
goods, explained in a flurry of psychotic euphoria just exactly which items of getting and spending had been in the ‘boom’
part of the ‘boom-and-bust’ economic cycle during the previous twelve months. Before I ran screaming from the room, the impossibly happy
shopper was explaining, apparently mid-orgasm, that men’s grooming products now
occupied twice as much shelf space as they had twelve months previously. Beard
oil, I learned, was something which last year almost no-one had heard of. But
now[1]?

With young men now wasting all of their spare time oiling beards[2],
it will be left to the beardless atheists of this country to follow in the
footsteps of great men like Benjamin Waugh. I plan to devote my spare non-God-bothering/freshly-shaven time to founding the NSPC.